Investigating the Relations among Different Measures of False Memory

The study of false memory has both theoretical and practical implications – understanding false memory in the laboratory can help explain the causes of false memory, helping researchers to better understand why false memories occur in the first place, as well as which underlying mechanisms are responsible for the emergence of these distortions (Zhu, Chen, Loftus, Lin, & Dong, 2013). Researchers have used the term false memory to refer to different types of memory errors, including the incorporation of erroneous information into a memory, misremembering a word presented as a picture, and the construction of a detailed memory of an event that did not occur. Whether such diverse manifestations of false memory are assessing the same construct has yet to be examined. The purpose of the current study is to examine the relations among a set of paradigms that have been used in the literature to measure false memory. Sixty-eight college-aged participants were recruited and completed four diverse false memory measures including the DRM and Misinformation paradigms, as well as the Childhood Experiences Questionnaire and a picture/word recall task. Results indicate that there are few significant relationships among four diverse measures of false memory, as well as among individual differences characteristics, and veridical memory performance. Two of the false memory measures exhibited low reliability, making it difficult to ascertain whether the lack of relationships among the variables are due to different underlying mechanisms or due to poor psychometric properties of the variables